Baby, It's Cold Outside!

Just when the climate change kooks are getting wound up in a new frenzy, touting the upcoming release of the U. N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as unequivocal proof of global warming, Mother Nature decided to throw a curveball – winter arrived.

As the death toll continues to mount in America from the sub-zero temperatures knocking out power in the Midwest and record snowfalls burying parts of the Northeast, the enviro-crazies look particularly ridiculous. Tell the folks in upstate New York about global warming, as they dig out from 100+inches of snow this week.

But more curveballs await. The IPCC policy report just released features the commentary of bureaucrats, not scientists, who are trying to spin the scientific report ahead of the May release of its full contents. But already the full report is being leaked, which is not good news for the scaremongers. Their goal is to force the scientists to adjust their conclusions to fit the policy report.

In the 2001 IPCC report, the U.N.’s high-end estimate of the rise in sea levels due to polar ice melting was three feet by the year 2100. The new report apparently scales that number back to 17 inches, or less than half the original estimate.

Because the IPCC conjecture relies on computer models, the results are only as good as the information plugged into the model. In other words, garbage in, garbage out. The perfect example is the dubious “hockey stick” analysis featured in the 2001 report, which purported to show that after 900 years of minor temperature fluctuations, a sharp spike upward occurred in the last century. Word has it that the hockey stick has been dropped from the new report since it has been shown to be a fraud.

S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, and a leading global warming skeptic, notes that about 20 greenhouse climate models range in warming predictions from 11.5 degrees Centigrade to 1.4 degrees C. So which model is correct? And why can none of these models explain why the earth cooled between 1940 and 1975 when the world was at a new height of industrialization?

As Dr. Singer points out, “Some cite the fact that the climate is currently warming and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising. This is true, but correlation is never proof of causation. In Europe, the birth rate is decreasing and so is the number of storks. Does this correlation prove that storks bring babies? Besides, the climate cooled for much of the 20th century, between 1940 and 1975, even while carbon dioxide was increasing rapidly.”

That doesn’t stop Al Gore and world-class nuts like Ted Turner from preaching doom and gloom about the horrible effects of carbon dioxide in generating greenhouse gases. What these charlatans haven’t told us is that carbon dioxide accounts for only about 0.03% of the earth’s atmosphere and less than 10% of the greenhouse effect. Moreover, only 14% of the carbon dioxide found in atmosphere comes from burning fossil fuels.

So the Kyoto treaty proponents like Gore would wreck our economy to eliminate carbon emissions responsible for 1.4% of the greenhouse effect.

But that doesn’t prevent Mr. Gore from spreading outlandish assertions such as this: “We are destabilizing the massive mound of ice on Greenland and the equally enormous mass of ice propped up on top of islands in West Antarctica, threatening a worldwide increase in sea levels of as much as 20 feet.”

Mainstream elite media like the Los Angeles Times lap up this nonsense and run irresponsible stories with headlines such as this: “Greenland’s Ice Sheet Is Slip, Sliding Away.”

Yet the latest IPCC report states it would take about 1,000 years of higher-than-historic temperatures for the Greenland ice sheet to melt entirely. Somehow I think Mother Nature will cool her jets in the interim, just as she has in the past.

A significant number of scientists are convinced that the warming that has occurred and will occur in the future is due to the sun. Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the space research laboratory at the Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg, Russia, has found considerable evidence of global warming on Mars. He has not, however, found any evidence on the Red Planet of coal-fired power plants or cars.

Hear the words of Dr. Tim Ball, former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada and the chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project: “Believe it or not, global warming is not due to human contribution of carbon dioxide. This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification.”

Dr. Ball notes that after the Little Ice Age in the early 1000s, the world began warming around 1680. In the most recent full century, temperatures declined from 1940 to 1975, and in the early 1970s, scientific consensus centered on global cooling. By the 1990’s, the world began another warming trend that continues today. For the entire 20th century, the planet warmed up 0.7 degrees C. (Heavens, turn up the air conditioning!)

For his outspokenness on this issue, Dr. Ball has been accused of being a tool of the oil companies. He’s been harassed by his academic colleagues and now finds it harder to get speaking engagements.

Folks who dare to question the global warming crowd are branded “on the payroll of Big Oil,” and even worse, put on a par with Holocaust deniers.

In a February 9, 2007 column, liberal elitist Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe wrote, “I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and the future.”

I hate to burst Ms. Goodman’s bubble, but there is an unquestionable factual basis for the Holocaust, beginning with the millions of bodies found after World War II, the Nazis’ filmed documentation of the crimes and the admissions of the perpetrators.

To compare that to scientific conjecture based on computer models, carefully selected time frames and bogus anecdotal evidence (polar bears on ice floes?) is obscene, disgusting and the highest form of convoluted logic. She should be embarrassed to besmirch the victims of the Holocaust in the name of promoting junk science. Ms. Goodman, shame on you.

But she effectively demonstrates the mentality we are facing. Facts, reason and logic go out the window when confronted by emotion, feelings and general hysteria.

Ms. Goodman laments the fact that a Pew Research Center poll shows that public attitudes on global warming place the issue at number 20 out of 23 policy priorities, behind terrorism, tax cuts, crime, morality and illegal immigration. While she may conclude that we are a bunch of rubes, I would offer the survey provides hard evidence that the folks on The Forgotten Street are a whole lot smarter than elites like Ms. Goodman. At least they aren’t as gullible.

Offering a contrarian view, George Will wrote in his column in the current issue of Newsweek, “Over the millennia, the planet has warmed and cooled for reasons that are unclear but clearly unrelated to SUVs. Was life better when ice a mile thick covered Chicago? Was it worse when Greenland was so warm that Vikings farmed there? Are we sure the climate at this particular moment is exactly right, and that it must preserved, no matter the cost?”

The cynic in me knows that this debate goes well beyond pure science. The scientists are mere pawns in a much larger game. What’s really at work here are two colliding world views: the globalists, or one-worlders, who believe an elite should decide what’s best for the rest of us, versus free-market traditionalists, who believe the more local the power and decision, the better.

This struggle has been going on since Adam showed up in the Garden of Eden and began procreation. Throughout history, kingdoms and empires have sought to control the masses. But fortunately, a few hundred years ago, some brave folks decided to challenge the norm and create something totally new: democracy.

The battle rages on. In the 20th century, communists and fascists tried to restore and preserve the old elitist order. They failed miserably. But they did not go away. With the fall of communism, the militant left did not rapture up into Heaven. They are still around, still seeking domination and using multinational institutions like the United Nations and the European Union to advance their cause.

Through global warming, they have found their useful idiots in the West, dupes like Al Gore, Ellen Goodman and Ted Turner who will work to advance a new world order.

It comes down to this: global warming (or climate change, depending on the name of the day) is just a vehicle to promote a global takeover of our economy and way of life. The militant left is driving the movement, using the United Nations and environmental groups to achieve what they haven’t been able to through the ballot box.

They will attack and smear those who oppose them, having learned their propaganda lessons from Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao. The Big Lie technique perfected by Joseph Goebbels is well underway, as the science of global warming is declared “solid,” “proven” and “unchallengeable.”

Nothing could be farther from the truth, as we will see when the IPCC report comes out in May. The scientific data behind the report will be obviously open to interpretation and discussion. That’s why the climate change kooks are fighting so vigorously now to declare the debate over before it ever begins.

Unfortunately for them, truth has a way of shining through. Just remember Hawkins’ Law: The more dire the prediction, the less likely it will come true. Truer words have never been spoken.

Remember the ozone controversy? How chemicals called chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) were eating a hole in the ozone layer and we all would be killed by skin cancer? That hysteria led to a global ban on CFCs back in 1989.

So naturally, the ozone hole problem must be getting better since CFC concentrations in the atmosphere began falling in 1995. Well, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the ozone hole is bigger and deeper than ever.

The source of the problem, according to NOAA, is colder than average temperatures in the Antarctic, which inhibit the CFC ban from working. This result is because cold weather creates larger and deeper holes in the ozone, while warmer weather makes them smaller.

Confused yet? Al Gore says Antarctica is melting, NOAA says it’s getting colder. Global warming is a threat to humanity, but it would reduce the size of the hole in the ozone layer? The climate change kooks need to get their story straight if they want to accomplish their global government agenda.

That hasn’t stopped big business from jumping on the global warming bandwagon. A group called the U. S. Climate Action Partnership has been formed by such industrial biggies as DuPont, General Electric, Alcoa and Caterpillar teaming up with the Natural Resources Defense Fund, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the World Resources Institute, among others.

Sensing that global warming regulation is an inevitability, these businesses have decided to accept cap-and-trade provisions that will let them off-load some of their emissions while getting greater governmental funding of so-called “green technologies.” If there’s a way to make a buck out of climate change, these folks will figure out how to do it and curry favor with politicians at the same time.

As Steven Milloy, adjunct professor at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and publisher of JunkScience.com (www.junkscience.com ) said in a recent Washington Times op-ed, “Beware of the eco-industrial complex.”

Beware, indeed. Bad science, inspired by extreme politics, threatens to take the world down a path of unnecessary economic disruption and weaker national sovereignty. We’ll all be the poorer for it.